ABSTRACT
According to Eugene Ionesco, ''To renew one's idiom or one's language is to renew one's conception or one's vision of the world." Defending his plays against Kenneth Tynan's charge of formalism divorced from observable reality, Ionesco argued that "Any new artistic expression enriches us by answering some spiritual need and broadens the frontiers of known reality."1 Ionesco's remarks are apposite to an earlier drama that has also been accused of a concern with form at the expense of substance. Jacobean tragicomedy, in fact, constituted a renewal of idiom such as Ionesco describes, one that enabled dramatists to explore the frontiers of known sexual reality. R. A. Foakes makes the point simply but cogently: the basis and one of the prime achievements of both Shakespearean and Fletcherian tragicomedy is the serious treatment of sexuality's darker strains within a comic framework? In Shakespeare's ironic tragicomedies illicit or problematic sex implicates some broader dislocation in the social and moral order. In the late romantic tragicomedies sexual malaise expresses the protagonists' temporary alienation from their spiritual universe. The scope of Fletcherian tragicomedy is narrower. Fletcher's tragicomedies focus on sexuality for its own sake. The results are at times prurient or titillating but also theatrically exciting and often psychologically compelling explorations of extreme, potentially tragic sexual dilemmas from whose worst consequences both the characters and the audience are generically protected. In this chapter I want to examine the effect of the tragicomic genre on Fletcher's dramatization of sexuality and, conversely, the effect of the sexual subject matter on his particular development of tragicomedy. 3
Jacobean drama in general foregrounds sexual motifs; it is the special province of tragicomedy, however, to explore the anxieties and fantasies that exist between desire and its fulfillment, between sexuality and the act of sex.4 The psychological complexity and the fascination of Fletcher's explorations of the more difficult areas of human sexuality derive from the requirements of the-tragicomic genre he has chosen to write in. Quite simply, this is because tragicomedy by its defining dramatic requirements, effectively, connects sex with both death and laughter. Tragicomedy, according to Guarini, combines the "comic order" (development of the plot towards a happy ending) and laughter of comedy with "the danger but not the death" of tragedy. Following Guarini, in his preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (1609) Fletcher wrote that a tragicomedy "wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie" and that its characters can range from "a God" to "meane people" (generically the source of laughter).5 In practice, Fletcher introduces the danger of death into the framework of romantic comedy by dealing explicitly with his lovers' sexuality. R. A. Foakes even suggests that tragicomedy can be distinguished as "a mode of drama in which the world of romantic comedy is invaded by the forces of sexuality."6 The (usually) unconsummated but fully realized sexuality that gives Fletcher's tragicomedies their hothouse atmosphere can be attributed in part to their genre. Revising his own tragicomic formula, we might say, "A Fletcherian tragicomedy wants sex, which is enough to make it no tragedy, but brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy." Since the particular sexual experience that he dramatizes must contain tragic potential, there has to be something wrong with it. Hence the motifs of incest, lust, rape, sexual jealousy, and frustration that have given Fletcherian drama its reputation for decadence and triviality, though these are hardly trivial subjects.
